


normalcy becomes a haven to the man who is meant for greatness

by Nellsie



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, i guess lmao i don't even know what it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 22:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13750293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nellsie/pseuds/Nellsie
Summary: He makes the mistake of looking into the empty eyes and unhinged jaw once, but he won't do it again. Not now, not ever.[a little character study of duck newton i guess.]





	normalcy becomes a haven to the man who is meant for greatness

Duck Newton is a little boy—only four or five years old—when he has his first  _real_  nightmare. It’s something mundane, a blissfully average nightmare for a kid to experience.

It’s a short-lived experience. He quickly wakes up from the nonsensical darkness to run to his mother and sleep in her bed, curling up to her and crying into her sleeve. “I don’t know what to do. What if I go to sleep and it’s there again and I—I don’t know what to do? Mama, I don’t wanna go back to sleep,” he rambles incoherently, half-mumbling and half-sobbing. It’s a reasonable reaction for a kid. His mom cradles him without question.

“I’ve got you, Ducky,” she whispers, holding him close. “You’ll be okay. We’ll be okay, it was just a nightmare sweetheart,” she runs a soft-skinned hand through his dark hair. “You can sleep here, tonight. You can sleep here.”

She kisses the top of his head and closes her eyes. It’s far too late at night to expect her to stay awake, fending away all of his childhood fears.

Duck listens to her steady breathing and tries to keep pace with it. He sleeps peacefully after that, and nightmares are far and few in between.

* * *

(This particular nightmare, though he won’t remember it in a few days, feels chillingly real. In the blue-dark there is nothing until there is something, and that something is a bear.

Or, there’s a bear for a little while until it shifts. Twists and turns and becomes something it always was, something terrifying. Its eyes are too big and too black and too empty, and then suddenly they aren’t eyes. They can’t see anything because nothing and no one is looking through them.

There is something so  _wrong_  about this bear, and Duck can only stand in place watching it become something awful. Then its jaws unhinge and it turns its head—and its empty eyes—towards Duck.

He runs in the dream, and then he jolts awake. He spends the night in his mother’s arms, but he spends it afraid.)

* * *

Duck is a young adult—only eighteen!—when he has his first vision, and it cements that he will not be afforded a normal life with normal nightmares about normal things. He rejects this fate, of course.

“I don’t want to be chosen,” he tells Minerva, folding his shirt and placing it at the bottom of his suitcase. “I just want to be normal. Just want to live a normal life.”

Minerva is, well, she is Minerva. Mysterious and spectral, her blue figure is a wisp in the mortal world so familiar to Duck. She seems to balk at this suggestion, before outright rejecting it. She begins laughing.

 _“You are very funny, Duck Newton!”_  She would grin if she could, but the projection she has in the real world lacks the features necessary. Instead her figure glows a brighter shade of azure. Duck doesn’t laugh with her, and soon her joy tapers off. She becomes quiet.  _“You are joking, yes?”_

She sounds very troubled. Duck hesitates, but he shakes his head. “I’m not—I’m not your guy. I’m not your chosen.”

He’s not the man who faces nightmares.

 _“You are not normal, Duck Newton,”_  she says, and it’s the least comforting thing she could say to him now, but she says it like she is giving him something valuable.  _“You cannot live a normal life, because you have never been chosen for such a thing.”_

He has not been  _chosen_  for a normal life.

“Tough shit,” he says, and there is anger in his voice. A bitterness welling up inside of him. He quickly folds a pair of jeans and tosses them into the suitcase more haphazardly than he had planned. “Pardon my language.”

 _“You are needed, Duck. People need you,”_  Minerva speaks with dampened enthusiasm, no longer gifting him such a destiny but instead passing a heavy object to him with careful urgency.  _“It is selfish, what you are doing. What you are leaving behind.”_

“Selfish, huh?” He wants to laugh.  _Selfish._  He supposes it’s true. It’s very selfish of him, but is it not selfish of the universe to ask him to sacrifice the mundane? Is it not selfish to ask him to leave behind everything for a destiny he barely understands?

Duck has bigger things to worry about than being selfish.

He folds more shirts, more pants. Some pairs of socks and shoes. An old GameBoy and cartridges of  _Pokémon_  games.

 _“Please, Duck Newton, think before you choose to run,”_  Minerva pleads,  _“What will you do with the weapon? What other chosen will we have to pluck from normalcy? What will you do, Duck?”_

He’ll get rid of the weapon. He doesn’t know what chosen they will pick—but hopefully it will be a more qualified one than Duck. He’ll do something, anything, but not this. He couldn’t face those visions if he tried.

 _“I will keep trying, keep following, Duck,”_ she’s calling him by his first name.  _“I will keep reminding you of your destiny.”_

He zips up his suitcase but not before opening his crummy laptop, quickly typing into Google and searching for bus tickets. He isn’t going away for a long time—but he’ll be gone for a long-enough one.

 _“This is no childhood nightmare, Duck Newton. This is a reality, and you must face the facts. You are not meant for normal life,”_  Minerva says, but he doesn’t respond. She disappears, wispy form disintegrating in the wind as if it were too disappointment to take active part in its own disappearance. She might be disappointed.

Duck runs from the vision as he did the nightmare.

* * *

Duck returns to Keplar, and the years pass and the nightmare dwindles. The darkness becomes a fixture in adult life, it only matters that he face it with adult insight. The child in him still runs, but the adult stays put. Analyzes the situation.

Minerva mourns the situation. Mourns the future she now has tenuous grasp on due to the unwilling chosen. She wilts when attempts to coerce him into heroic acts fail.

Still, she remains strong in the face of adversity. Loud and genuine, she tries her best. She becomes a friend to Duck, if anything. Originally, she would be a guide to him in his journey. An ally. Instead, she jokes about crossfit and keeps a close eye on him from wherever she is.

There is purpose in what he does, she says. He is still keeping people safe, still helping. The universe smiles down on him, but it would smile more if he’d follow his destiny. Duck sort of shrugs in response, because half of that statement is nice. He’s not sure about the other half.

* * *

The nightmare still follows Duck. The visions are an extension of it, but he knows.

He knows there is something lurking in the inky blackness. It waits hungrily for a fool to look into its empty eyes and unhinged jaw.

Duck happens to be a bit of a fool.


End file.
